2016 Garden Wrap Up

Well, honestly the yard work isn’t quite complete and there are some things left in the garden that hasn’t been cleaned out. Really out of pure laziness and putting other things first BUT truly the garden is done for the year. It was a rough end of the summer for the garden but it continued to show me grace and provide me with a lot of food which is now either canned into jars ready for the long winter, waiting to be eaten in the pantry or already gobbled up by my veggie loving toddler.

It was a fantastic year in the garden for me. The best yet, and although I’m definitely ready for a break I’m already dreaming up the plans for next year. Each year I learn so many new things, this year a lot of my learning was about where to plant what due to the ample gardening space I now have. I did a lot of experimenting with tomatoes planting them in the big garden, small garden and containers and have decided that next year they will only be planted in the big garden. The peppers did pretty good in containers but I think next year I will plant some in the garden as well, later on in the season of course. I may plant my lettuce into some long containers my dad made for me. It will save space and I can keep it in cooler places on the deck rather than full sun in the garden. The gardens in front of the greenhouse will have some ground cover and low lying flowers. They are just not deep enough to get good roots for tall plants so I’ll try that next year. The garden along the deck will have a lot of squash varieties and some flowers again, probably different varieties. Flowers were one of my favourite parts of the garden, next year I’ll focus my flower growing on varieties that would be good cut and put into bouquets. I could have probably done that with this years flowers, I just didn’t have the energy or creative inspiration to do it.

The tomatoes did amazingly, in the end I harvest a total of 136 lbs of tomatoes. That’s a whole lot of canning (I’ll do a separate food preserving post later on) and I grumble through it but I am so grateful to be putting food I grew myself away for my family in the winter. The onions produced pretty well too, I didn’t get huge onions but quite a lot and they are cured and now in my pantry waiting to be used. The habaneros did way better than I expected and we have a full baggy in the freezer to use through out the year. The kale just kept going and going but unfortunately didn’t get used much because I couldn’t stomach leafy greens for a couple months. Same goes for swiss chard. The spaghetti squash produced more than I expected and I have lots left to eat throughout the next couple months. The other squash varieties did nothing – some I started in the greenhouse and they got root bound before planted so didn’t do well, others I planted in the garden from seed and they didn’t have enough time to produce anything. I’ll work on that next year. The other things like carrots, peas, beans, lettuce all did well as well.

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the garden at the end of the year because I didn’t keep up on it and it ended up not being very pretty, but here’s what I did take:

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My name's Ashley, I'm a wife, momma, and nurse. I'm on a journey to simplify my life so that I can fully enjoy every moment without the distraction of "things". Thanks for stopping by and remember to say hello!